How WeWork's Adam Neumann made a pigeon look like a swan

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha took a trip down memory lane to the great WeWork saga. We had WSJ reporter and author Eliot Brown on the show to chat about his new book, The Cult of We, written with his colleague Maureen Farrell. You can snag it here if you haven't already. Brown and Farrell were key reporting voices during WeWork's rise, and fall, covering the company's growth, hijinks, and demise. Recently, WeWork has filed to go public via a SPAC, bringing the co-working startup to the public markets years after it initially tried for an IPO. It will debut at a fraction of the value that it once commanded on the private markets. For fun, you can read the original WeWork S-1 filing here. The WeWork-SPAC deck is here. While we had Brown on the show, we took the time to dive into how he handled reporting the WeWork story, what his take is on today's startup market, and how the tech media in general can do a better job. It felt like a masterclass for journalists and founders alike, which we'd argue is Equity's sweet spot. What lessons can we take away from WeWork's rise and fall? At a very basic level, that companies with slim gross margins are not software companies and should not be valued as such. And that allowing founders to have monarchical control of their company goes against historical norms of good corporate governance, which isn't so smart. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Runches Venture Capital Focus Podcast, where we unpack
0:14.6	the numbers behind the headlines.
0:16.3	My name is Alex Wilhelma and I am joined today by my colleague and dear friend,
0:19.4	Natasha Moskarenis.
0:20.7	Natasha San Francisco, I hear, is still there. How's it going? San Francisco is
0:24.3	there and last time I checked I have a pulse. Oh my gosh San Francisco lives
0:28.5	contrary to all the rumors. Listen everyone we have a special show for you today we
0:31.9	are gonna kind of blaze a new trail and instead of doing our usual deep dive into like FinTech in the UK or whatever we are going to have another journalist on namely Elliot Brown the author of a recent kick-ass book called the
0:44.4	cult of we digging into the broad arc of the Weew Works story Elliot you're
0:48.2	reporter to the journal you're here with us how are you excited to be here As a data point for everyone, I blasted through this book over the weekend, super digestible.
0:57.2	The easiest analogy I think is that if you read the Theranos book, I think it's called Bad Blood, it has a similar fun flow to it.
1:03.8	So unlike most business books, you don't want to die while you're reading it, which is a great
1:08.6	place to start.
1:09.6	But Natasha, we have a zillion questions, but we want to start out a little bit with some reporting questions, I think.
1:14.6	So why don't you take the lead?
1:15.6	Yeah, so Elliot, I started reporting on tech around two years ago, which is when the
1:19.5	We Work story started to really loudly manifest.
1:22.4	For people who are kind of catching up or want to
1:25.9	reminisce, take us back to like the early years of reporting on it and my first question,
1:31.7	specifically,
1:32.6	what did access look like for you
1:34.6	when you were first talking to We Work?
	...

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